The ongoing hockey culture war doubling as the Toronto Maple Leafs' 2013-14 season took an unexpected turn on Wednesday — Don Cherry, king of old-guard, conventional wisdom, basically agrees with the nerds.

1) Randy Carlyle upset after the game against Minnesota. He knows you're living in a fools paradise. When you think you're playing well and

Cherry is talking about the Leafs' 4-1 win over the Minnesota Wild on Tuesday night. "The worry for coaches is that some night we’re going to get our butts kicked playing like this," Carlyle himself said after the game, which puts his team at 6-1-0 despite regularly (and drastically) getting outshot. The thinking boils down to the Leafs ostensibly believing in shot quality, which almost certainly doesn't exist.

Each side of the debate is convinced the Maple Leafs are going to prove it right, which has left everyone practically giddy with anticipation over how Toronto's season will play out. It's an argument that's happening right now around office watercoolers, in bars, and even in online sportsbooks.

The old-school crowd would love nothing more than to see the Leafs succeed again. Even some fans of other teams, who'd normally never root for the league's most arrogant and overhyped organization, have taken to hoping Toronto can do just well enough to send the numbers folks scurrying back to debug their spreadsheets.

Meanwhile, the advanced-stats community can barely contain their excitement over the coming crash-and-burn that they're convinced is inevitable. They're expecting a repeat of their decisive win over Wild fans, only on a much larger stage. It's not an exaggeration to think that Leafs losses could do for hockey stats what 2002 Oakland A's victories did for baseball sabermetrics.

And now, though they'd rather drink bleach than admit it, Cherry and Carlyle have endorsed advanced stats/Corsi/whatever you want to call it, which boils down to shot-attempt differential. Don Cherry loves Corsi. Randy Carlyle loves spreadsheets. They both love computers, and they're going to look at usage charts together every day.

Or, they're walking proof that the debate is even dumber than it seems, because everyone's talking about the same thing — and, more specifically, that Corsi and "advanced stats" are, for right or wrong, loaded terms. Either way, the irony is fantastic.